On 3 February the whole of Year 7 had a fantastic time working with Dr James Grime and his 70 year old Enigma machine. The Enigma machine was extensively used by the German forces during World War Two. It was thought to be unbreakable. To code a message, the German soldier typed a word and noted down the letters that lit up. This coded message was sent on and typed into the receiving machine, from which would come out the decoded message. This was a very effective way of sending a coded instruction, until the British Mathematicians at Bletchley Park managed to crack the code. Alan Turing's invention of the Bombe machine is thought to have saved thousands of lives and ended the war 2 years early.After Dr Grime explained to us how the Enigma machine worked and showed us other ways of coding messages, we decoded our own. Dr Grime told us the most frequent letter in English was E, the second was T and the third was A. Using frequency analysis we were able to break the cypher and decode the message.

During the workshop we also worked with a partner to crack different codes, for example semaphore-flag positioning, the pigpen and Playfair methods - which use squares and boxes, and even tiny enigma codes. When the codes were broken, they revealed a fact about a person. After we had finished, we were able to guess that that person was Alan Turing.

We had such a brilliant time during the workshop, and everyone thoroughly enjoyed learning about cryptology.